Fresh Off The Bus
Follow Claptrap into Fyrestone Walkthrough You'll step off the bus to find yourself at the east entrance to Fyrestone, with nothing in your possession but a single low-quality gun. Speak to the Claptrap to get your HUD online, then follow it to the New-U station, where you'll automatically save your progress. If you use the console at the New-U station, you can open up a menu that allows you to change your character's name and colour scheme (to distinguish yourself in multiplayer sessions). Later in the game, the New-U stations will also offer an option to redistribute your skill points. After demonstrating the New-U, the Claptrap rolls towards the north gate of Fyrestone. Rather than following him, give the area a thorough search for money, ammo and guns. You can search any object with a flashing green light (even discarded toilets), but around here, only the dumpsters have a chance of holding new guns. Red chests, on the other hand, always hold weapons (or at least Grenade Mods). The game's first red chest is on the roof of the hotel, and there are several ways to reach it. The easiest way is to jump from the generator on the hotel's south porch directly to the roof. The chest typically offers two new guns, both of which are probably more powerful than your default weapon. Now that you have a gun in each slot and a pocket full of ammo and cash, it's time to catch up with your Claptrap. Meet him at the Fyrestone gates, where he opens the door just as a bandit raiding party bursts into town. Instead of rushing at the bandits, use the ruins of the city to your left as cover. This allows you to fire at the nearest bandit while keeping a wall between yourself and his friends. If you have a reasonably accurate weapon, like a combat rifle or repeater pistol, aim for headshots to score deadly critical hits. With shotguns or submachine guns, you should instead aim to score as many hits as possible with dead-center body shots. After you take out the first wave of five or six bandits, Claptrap stops at another red chest containing a fixed set of repeater pistols. These basic handguns provide a good opportunity to see each manufacturers speciality: The Torgue deals extra damage, the Hyperion has superior accuracy, the Vladof has a faster fire rate and the S&S Munitions offers an extended magazine. Grab them even if they aren't better than your current guns-you can always sell them later for cash at any vending machine. Duck under some rubble to follow the Claptrap to a second New-U pole, then leap over a small iron wall toward a second group of bandits. As you blast your way through town, keep an eye out for piles of green-glowing skag vomit that may hold ammo and recovery items. You'll also find a dark grey chest, which contains a large supply of ammunition, at the westernmost point in town. This was taken directly from the walkthrough. Things You Should Know Picking A Character To Play *When playing solo, the easiest character to play is probably the Soldier because his special ability/weapon can kill or slow down multiple foes. The hardest to play is probably the Siren because her special ability, Phasewalking, is mainly defensive (compared to the other characters), at least for the majority of the game. *After you complete the final mission, you can play through the missions again with your accumulated skills, weapons, and loot, or you can start over with a new character, so you can play as each character if you wish. If you continue with the same character, the missions remain the same, but the enemies get much tougher and cash and loot found goes up in value. Loot *As in all games of this type, always take your time to look around for loot because that is generally how you will get the most valuable resources in the game. If a main path goes one way and a nook, room or other limited area is the other way, check out the nook/room/area first. Some of the best loot is in areas away from the main path. For example, when you get off the bus at the start of the game, search the immediate area for loot before going with the Claptrap. There's a weapon box on the roof of the building to your immediate left, as you exit the bus, plus ammo and cash in various containers around the area. *Your backpack has a limited capacity. If it gets full, you cannot pick up what may be a valuable weapon unless you drop something else first, in which case you usually want to sort your inventory list by weapon (to make sure you are not dropping, say, your only revolver), and where you have multiple weapons of one type (including grenade mods and shields), drop the least valuable. *When picking up ammo, hold down the X button (in Xbox) and all the ammo in the ammo crate or close by on the ground will be obtained at once (except for ammo you are already maxed out on). *When picking up a weapon, shield, or mod, if you hold down X too long, the item will automatically be equipped and if your backpack is maxed out, a better, already-equipped weapon will be dropped. If you don't notice what happened, you can lose a good item for a lesser one. *Use Vending machines for buying ammo, weapon ammo capacity upgrades, and health, as well as for selling back unneeded weapons and mods you have picked up. You are much better off spending your money on weapon capacity upgrades which you cannot get anywhere else than on slightly more powerful weapons which will soon be replaced by finding more powerful ones. Capacity upgrades are expensive. In tough battles, you may need money to restock your ammo, so don't spend your last few dollars on upgrades, but otherwise, get them as soon as you have enough cash so that the upgrade doesn't leave you broke. As the game progresses, ammo vending machines will offer larger capacity upgrades. *Before buying an ammo capacity upgrade, max out that ammo and when you get the upgrade, you will get free ammo for it; otherwise, you will have to buy more ammo to max out the extended capacity. *When you first get a weapon, it will easily kill current foes, but before long, you will notice that it takes more and more ammo to kill foes when using the same weapon, which is why you must constantly be on the lookout for new, more powerful weapons. *Loot in lockers and crates sometimes respawns, but not as quickly as foes do. As you exit an area you have already looted, don't expect more loot. One exception is that if you exit the game, when you start again, general loot usually will have respawned. In fact, if you have the patience, when you find valuable loot near a spawning point, such as the weapons crate on the roof of Lucky's, you can get the (expensive) weapons, get all the cash from inside and from around the Catch-A-Ride, then exit the game and restart and all the loot can be picked up again. This can be repeated until you get tired of it. *When you enter a new area via a Waypoint, the first things you will usually come to are vending machines. Before stocking up on ammo, look around the area (even look ahead a little ways) for ammo crates and skag piles. It's a waste to max out your ammo and then notice more free ammo around which you can no longer pick up because you maxed out for cash. Health *You will come across very small immediate health boost injections on the ground from time to time, marked by a red symbol. "Immediate" means that they cannot be added to your backpack, and if your health meter is currently full, you cannot use them. You sometimes will find small health kits in lockers which can be added to your backpack. *At a health vending machine, the option to buy an immediate health boost costs significantly more than buying a health kit and using it after you exit the machine's menu. Smaller health kits cost more per unit of health boost than larger ones. *As you travel, you will see tall poles with either red or green lights at the top and at the base. The red lights will turn green as you approach the pole. The location of the last pole you saw turn green is where you will respawn if killed. This can be very significant because if you miss approaching a pole to turn it green, you may get killed and end up at the start of a long path from where you will have to fight your way through tough foes again. In some cases, it is worth running or sneaking past some foes to get to a nearby pole before engaging the foes. *When you get killed, it costs money to respawn. The cost is a percentage of how much cash you have, which is another reason to invest in ammo capacity upgrades rather than carrying around a lot of cash. *When you are about to die, you get a chance to kill a foe, and if you do so, you will recover. If the only foes around are hard to kill, you must be very careful, but if you have multiple attackers nearby, chances are that you can kill one of them with your second chance. If you die, your remaining opponents will get all their health back (as will you), but if you pull out a second chance, they will not. This feature is so significant that most of the way through the game, you may not even need to carry/use health packs, particularly when making use of things which will restore some of your health such as Transfusion Grenade mods. *If you are about to level up or exit the game, do not bother to boost your health because both of these things will restore full health and shields. Quests *Never miss a side quest/mission. This is how you increase your skills and acquire more money, experience, and special weapons (plus: you paid for the game to PLAY; talking shortcuts is not getting your money's worth from the game). In particular, never miss a chance to repair a broken Claptrap when you come across one because the reward each time is 3 slots added to your backpack, which are invaluable as the game progresses both for carrying more weapons to use and picking up more weapons to sell. In fact, the backpack upgrade is usually more valuable in the long run than whatever you get for completing the actual quest you are on. *A skill level is recommended by the game for each quest. Trying a quest rated higher than your skill level will be very tough, but if you go through one rated much lower than your skill level, the cash/XP rewards will matter less to you and you will get fewer points for killing the foes who are now much weaker than you. So it is best to take quests in skill-level order. *If you exit the game, you will start back at the beginning of the area you were in, not at the last spawning pole, so it is best to quit before starting a long, tough mission rather than having to restart it after you exit, though if your mission involves collecting items or killing a specific number of foes, you will not lose your progress. *Foes respawn pretty quickly in Borderlands. If you have to go out of an area the same way you came in, expect to have to fight pretty much all the same foes again. Also, if you take too long in an area, such as trying to figure out how to get to the Claptrap repair kit in Tetanus Warren, the foes in the area will respawn and you end up having to battle them again. In some areas near the end of the main mission line, enemies spawn continuously, so you have to constantly battle them while trying to accomplish quests in the area. General Battle Strategy *Once you get access to vehicles, if you can drive up to the edge of a cluster of exposed enemies, you can stay in the vehicle, target them, and blast them with the vehicle's unlimited canon ammo or just run over them. If bandits are in an area your vehicle cannot enter, you can usually still drive up to the entrance and target many of the enemy inside from there. Just keep clicking the lock-on button until no more are shown. *Whether riding or walking, if enemies start after you, back off while firing. If they get right up on you when you are on foot, melee attacks can be more efficient than trying to shoot them. If enemy are upon you and things are looking bleak, take off running. Usually, enemy will not chase you forever and when they stop, you can shoot at them from a distance while your shields recharge. *You will see barrels everywhere you go around Pandora. Red ones contain flammable material and green ones, corrosive material. In a shootout, aim for the barrels. They will blow up and kill nearby foes faster than shooting at the foes. In the heat of a firefight, it is hard to remember to look for barrels, but if you are approaching a group of foes, look for barrels before shooting. In fact, the first shot at a foe will rarely, if ever, kill him, but if you wait for a walking foe to get close to a barrel and then shoot the barrel, it will usually do him in. Also look for barrels closer to you that you can shoot to kill foes coming after you while you are backing away. *Obviously, don't duck behind barrels because if a stray bullet hits one, it will blow up and kill you. When driving a vehicle, do not run into a barrel because it will blow up and kill you. *If you run low on ammo or just don't have the time or desire to fight your way out of an area you have completed, it is possible to run all the way back to the waypoint to escape. Foes usually will not chase you for very long distances. Even if you happen to get killed, you will respawn at the last pole you turned green and can continue running. Once you hit the button to go through a waypoint, the foes will not follow you, and on the other side of the waypoint are usually vending machines where you can restock. *You do not have to engage every enemy you see. You usually get a pretty good number of Experience Points for killing newer enemies, but once you have progressed and have to go back through areas where you see old enemies, the XP for killing them becomes less and less significant. If an enemy is off in the distance walking around, they will not attack you unless you attack them first. Of course, if they come after you and you plan on hanging around the area, you'll have to deal with them; otherwise, you can ignore them. Glitches *Borderlands has the usual glitches for a game of this type -- loot floating above the ground, enemies sticking halfway out of doors, etc. *It is possible for your character to get stuck in some odd spot where you cannot move. If this happens, you can exit the game, but when you start back up, you will be put back to the start of the area you were in and may lose a lot of progress along the trail and all the enemies will likely respawn. If you know a spawning point is nearby, an alternative is to induce opponents to kill you. This will cost you some money for respawning, but will keep you close to where you got stuck and will not cause your foes to respawn. If no enemies are nearby or they can't kill you, if you happen to have a rocket launcher, shoot a rocket into something right next to you. A few rockets should kill you so that you can respawn. Video Walkthrough thumb|300px|left Category:Story Missions